Behind the BastardsCZM Rewind: Part One: King Leopold II: The First Modern Bastard
Original Air Date: June 12th, 2018
Have you ever heard of King Leopold II? In Episode 7, Robert is joined by Andrew Ti (Yo, Is This Racist?) and they discuss the King of Belgium, who was the first world leader to be crappy in the true modern sense of the word. His life’s work was the blueprint for being the kind of terrible that we recognize in modern leaders like Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin. He pioneered screwing over tens of millions of people for petty personal gain
Al Zon Media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and you know it's another holiday week. This is not a holiday I tend to celebrate, but it is a holiday that our company gives us off, and I like my team not having to work. It's also good to not have to work. And when we drop episodes on weeks like this, it means you basically have to double up during the week before the week after, which causes a lot of stress that isn't necessary when you're trying to have everyone be able to relax. So this week we are doing another rewind our infamous and beloved episodes on King Leopold, the Second of Belgium. So tuck in and enjoy yourselves and enjoy a real terrible story of a real terrible piece of shit. I hope you all have a good week, regardless of what you do during it. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in history. On this show, we cover monsters like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Eric Prince Will Wheaton, and today's topic, King Leopold. But before we get to King Leopold, i'd like to introduce my guests for the week, Andrew T host of YO is this racist and general man about town. Hello Andrew, what's up? Well? Today we're talking about a little Belgian dude named Leopold. You ever heard of King Leopold of Belgium?
Uh, not particularly.
King Leopold the second, if that makes sense. Yeah.
I feel like, uh, the closest I'm gonna come is I feel like, at some point I got a box of fancy chocolates that might have had a a Leopold. Maybe not the bad Leopold. I assume a good Leopold.
This is not a good Leopold.
Yeah, That's what I'm saying. So probably not this particular Yeahold.
Yeah. Uh. Leopold the second was King of Belgium once upon a time, and he was, in my opinion, the first world leader to be truly shitty in the modern sense of the word. Oh snall, like like like the k in a shitty that like Putin and Trump right.
Right right, So not right, we're discounting our Genghis cons.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because Genghis Khan like did what he did, but he didn't have like a bunch of newspapers that he justified. He was just like, I'm gonna conquer some shit, right right, right now.
This is the transition from barbarian bastards into media bastards exactly.
And I think Leopold of Belgium is really where it happens in a modern like obviously other people had toyed with aspects of this. He really nailed it. So King Leopold the Second's dad was obviously King Leopold the First, and he was the first king in Belgium. Is that obvious? Is that?
Is it always like a like one Pagets two or is it like, ah, your grandfather was Leopold the First, I'm Gerald of Belgium, but you're gonna be Leopold too.
I think that's more how it happens most of the time. Yeah, not this time. This time Leopold the First was like this went so, well, yeah, we're gonna have it. The second going yeah. So Leopold the First was like the again, the very first king of Belgium at all, because Belgium had just been made a thing in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. So during the whole fighting between Napoleon and everyone else in Europe, Belgium was generally the battleground where like the everyone would sort of duke it out between the Germans and the French and the French and everybody else. Yeah, Waterloo is in Belgium. Oh so, after Napoleon's butt gets kicked, the European powers who win are like, okay, we can't have France and Germany fighting over Belgium. We're gonna make it its own thing. And since it was going to be a new country, obviously it needed a king. So they Leopold the First got the job because he was a German prince who didn't have a kingdom of his own.
Oh okay, so he was just like split off, right, this is like we're gonna give Megan markle Wales or whatever.
Part of Whales. Yeah, part of whales. Yeah, yeah, it's that exactly that sort of thing. They actually tried him out to be king of Greece first, but he didn't like, didn't fit for whatever. Yeah, that's an option. We're gonna find you with something, buddy, don't worry, Leopold. Oh my god, to put you in a kingdom Greece isn't the right one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you try it starter kingdom. Everyone has a kingdom to start.
Yeah, yeah, sense, Yeah, Greece was his unsold pilot. Yeah. And he was, by all accounts a pretty good king of Belgium if you're into that sort of thing. Yeah. Waffles, waffles and chocolate, hacolate, getting beer beer, yeah, get great beer, getting jammed by the Germs, great beer. Great at getting jammed by the Germans. That's Belgium in a nutshell. But yeah, he was a good king while he was king. Midway through his reign in eighteen forty eight, there was like this big year of revolutions all across Europe, and all these European countries had their monarchs overthrown except for Belgium. So the Christian Spring we call that, yes, the white Man's Spring. That's the last three hundred years. Yeah, that's true.
What a time, What a time for the whites, given up for the whites.
Yeah, So Leopold the first solid king. I've got two main sources for today's podcast, which I should note now. The first is a biography called Leopold, the Second King of Belgium. It's a pro monarchist book that was written in nineteen ten. Great the article is critical above of Leopold sometimes, but he thinks he was like a great king, and he thinks kings are a good idea. Yeah. So it's an interesting book because it gives you an idea of how Leopold himself would sort of present himself and defend himself and let you know what the propaganda at the time.
Was well and also right, just critical enough to be legitimate.
Well no, no, it's totally I guess for the time it wasn't bad.
What I mean, you put in just the faintest of criticism to give the exact more you know. Yeah, oh, this is a real investigation.
Yeah, it's like the monarch's equivalent of one of those like celebrity biographies Ben Affleck or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Heraldo Interview of books exactly right, exactly. And then the other book is a book called Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hoschild, which takes the stance that Leopold was when of history's great monsters. Anyway, so these are these are most of what I come from, a sort of the contrasting views that these two books.
You read two books for a podcast out of your mind, Come.
On, dog, there's a lot to dig into here. Oh and there's not a lot.
You're making me feel real bad. I'm like, usually good for half a Wikipedia article.
Holy shit, Well this is at least the equivalent of like four Wikipedia articles a lot. Geez, go ahead, all right. So, uh, Leopold the Second's mom Luis was almost a love match is the term the book uses for his dad, the king, And it says this because the king was already in love with her before they get married. Hey, so that makes it a love match. So nice. He liked her when she was fourteen, so it's love. The eighteen hundreds were hell of it.
And she had the right land I assume, Yeah, she had some nice land. I'm related to the right enemies she was with I think from the oily owned family, so she was like she had.
Some solid s or royal pedigree. You know. You get some German from King Leopold the first, you get a little bit of French from his wife, and then their baby is sort of a mix. So maybe Germany and France won't fight over Belgium. And oh what a brave Yeah didn't write it. Yeah, yeah, So Leopold the Second was born Leopold Louis Philippe Mary Victor, and he was his parents' second child. His older brother died eleven months before he was born. Nice, So if you think about that timeline a lot, it's not very fun. Because Leopold's older brother is born. Yeah, he dies, Yeah, eleven months later they pop out another son. Yeah, immediately, immediately, not a lot of morning time. Nah, or maybe they just kind of, you know, fucked the pain away.
But yeah, yeah, that's probably what happened.
That's the optimistic look, all right. So at age five, Leopold's father declared him Duke of Brabant, which is how he was addressed right up until his coronation. Uh, here's he said, five, age five? Yeah, h five, great, yeah you can you all have to be a duke at age five.
And he looks he looks like he looks like people in this port a pretty little duke.
We'll have the pictures up on our website. He has no chin and a kind of a lopsided face, but maybe that's just the painting looks a.
Little bit like a ghost, like a human ghost.
It looks like the painting of a ghost that you find in the basement of an old house. Yeah, and then like there's a rush of wind and the camera falls over and like, yeah, your friend gets mauled by a spirit.
Yeah, and that's this guy's selfie essentially. Yeah, that's this guy's like, this is the image we want to put out into the world.
Yeah, this was like hanging in palaces. Yeah. Yeah, height, So he looks like a creeper from dad, a little spooky boy, but he's still a baby. So the biography notes that Leopold and his siblings were brought up in quote the simplest manner and taught to behave as if they were normal citizens rather than royalty. That sounds great until you get to the next part quote. The king further expressed the wish to develop in the children the sentiment of duty and not to allow them to have an opinion of their own with regard to their duties and their studies. Basically, the king was trying to crush the individuality of his kids so that they would just fit the role of king. That's kind of yeah.
Good, Actually is it isn't that? Well, what else are you gonna do because they got to do.
This dumb job? Well, I mean, you could try to make them be healthy, fully formed people.
Yeah, but why then they got to be king.
Yeah. Well, okay, that's fair. I mean we're taking Leopold the first side.
Yeah, well he's the good one again, I'm piating his chocolate. No, but right, isn't that the he's he's just as trapped as everyone else, you know, Yes, so if he's got to do this thing, you.
Might as well make it so he can do this thing. Okay, So you're expressing some motivation maybe to why you would do this, why you would do what he winds up doing, and you don't even know what he winds up doing what they do? Yeah, what did I just defend?
I still let me just say right now, whatever he does, I stand behind it.
Well, he kills about ten to fifteen million people. Yeah that's fine. Okay, Well, what's it? So? When Leopold is fifteen, his mom dies of some illness or another. It's one of those things where the writers at the time aren't specific. They're just like she took ill and was, yeah, sick for it, like and then she dies like yeah, yeah, it's probably diphtheria or some weirdo named it the flu disease. Yeah, if it was a flu would be a big deal, I guess. I mean it's probably is a flu like that killed everybody back then. Yeah. Yeah. In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Haschild describes Leopold's childhood as being kind of stark and cold. Quote, if Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an audience. When the father had something to tell the same, he communicated it through one of his secretaries.
I mean, look, this is not just eighteenth century arrested development.
Yeah, quite a nice Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's going on. Like, he definitely has a buster Bluth vibe to him.
Again, especially once you see this fucking painting, you'll get it audience.
The biography that was written at the time says that it is worthy of note that the late king never had any comrades or playmates. His childhood was passed among his teachers and tutors, and the disciplinarian father made even more the relationship with his brother and sister a very formal one. Frank, childish gaiety and brotherly expansion and confidence were banished. The prince's thoughts thus became concentrated upon himself and his natural activity and vitality. His exuberant strength were expended on work and study. Tight, yeah about it. No, friends, does nothing but work. Yeah, he is a duke. Yeah, I mean he's already achieved a lot. I mean he is kind of a boss baby. Yeah, just throw that out there. So he grows up, He serves in the Belgian military. He apparently does okay. By his early twenties, Leopold becomes an influential figure in Belgian politics. You know, he's the crown prince everyone, he's going to wind to be in king. Yeah, and he kind of looks a little like Adam Driver. He yeah, he looks here. He looks like a anime Adam Driver. Yeah. Yeah, that's who you would cast, is anime Adam Driver. Yeah yeah, in the movie. So, like many rich young people, he traveled far and wide in his early twenties. He went all throughout the Middle East, North Africa, parts of Asia. But he was not traveling for his enjoyment. It was basically traveling. The biography says, it's like a commercial employee. So he was essentially looking for financial opportunities for Belgium because this is the period when all of Europe is colonizing the entire world. Yeah, Belgium doesn't have a colony, so he's traveling all around the Middle East in Asia basically being like what can yeah, who's yeah? Whose line can we take? Yeah? Yeah, what can we get? Does this hop ahead to the Congo? Oh yes, oh nice, Yeah that's where we're headed.
Tight, Okay, how do I know that tiny bit of history?
It's one of those things that drops in every now and then you'll hear like, oh, yeah the Belgiums did something bad in the Congo, but you don't ever get I don't know any tell story.
In fact, I probably no more plot points from Michael Crichton's The Congo than than reality is the Cogo.
Yes, I mean there's unconfirmed reports that he tried to find the lost City of Zine, but no, great movie.
Is that what they were doing there?
Yeah? Yeah, they're trying to find diamonds. That a monkey There was a monkey city, Yeah, find diamonds. Yeah, the monkeys were evil. Yeah, that's more what I remember. Solid, to be honest, really solid. Now, Yeah, there's a laser. There is a laser. There's definitely a laser in that movie. Oh man, what a weird.
It's a ride, Michael Crichton, We're still watching as bullshit, I can't believe West World.
Yeah, sorry, okay, So, uh, Prince Leopold, one of his favorite books as he's a young man studying trying to find a new colony for Belgium is a book about the Dutch East Indies called Java, How to Manage a Colony. Uh yeah, why would you?
Oh my god, I mean, I guess that's what you have to tell people your favorite book is.
But yeah, that's well, no, I mean, because so the book is all about how the Dutch colonized the island of Java and how they got a shitload of coffee and sugar and like dyes and tobacco, and it made basically made so much money that they were able to buy a bunch of railroads and canals back in Holland. So like, the book is all about that. So it outlines sort of how they were able to monetize Java so well, and like it talks about how the king basically brought in a bunch of private companies and became a major shareholder in those companies. And it was the company's job to farm the land and to produce the resources and export them to Belgium. So the king didn't have to send Dutch government workers over do anything. The king just said, I own Java corporations. Come in, give me a stake in your profits, and do whatever you want.
I think it's just cool to have political leaders also own corporations. That has never been a problem. I never will be a problem.
No, it seems to always work out great. It seems to work out great one hundred perc end of the time. The book also did note that the Dutch prophets in Java would have been impossible without a huge amount of forced labor, and young Prince Leopold agreed with this and said that forced labor was quote the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the Far East. Yeah, yeah, he ain't wrong. Go ahead, what else? What else you got? I thought you said this guy was bad, all right. So late in his dukedom, you know, a few years before he becomes king, Leopold gets him in front of Belgium's Senate and he urges them to take up foreign colonies. So they got a king and a senate. Yeah yea, so uh. Basically, the king of Belgium is kind of a ceremonial figure he's got. He's got more power than like the queen in England has today. It's heading towards but it's heading towards that. There's no formal power, lots of soft power, lots of soft power and a little bit of formal power. Okay, but you can't do things as the king like just make colonies, right? You can't do things? Is the king like sin the army places? Yeah? Yeah, And so leop Hold's dad seems to be okay with that. But Leopold is growing up chopping at the bent to do shit and doesn't want to become a monarch who just waves at the crowd. Why So he gets up in front of the Senate and he says, quote, I am profoundly convinced of our vast resources, and I passionately wish that my beautiful country would show the necessary pluck to derive all the benefit which, in my opinion, it can derive. I think that the moment for our expansion abroad has arrived. We must not lose time, otherwise the best positions and markets, which are becoming more rare every day, will be occupied by nations more enterprising than ourselves. And when he talks about positions and markets. He's talking about yeah, whole countries and stuff. I mean millions of people.
It's more chilling in the original Flemish.
Yeah, Flemish. Yes, yeah, he nailed it, although he probably would have been speaking just French.
For a All right, so say Flemish.
Well you can say, you can say Walloon if you want. I'm kidding, what is that. That's the other group of people. There's Belgium is made up of Flemish people and Walloons. Yeah, the Wallunatics.
Yeah, of course, band aid on their face.
We got it. That's a rough name to grow into the world stage taking on.
Ah, well, you know, you gotta get you get enough rifles, get enough cutlasses, everything starts to make sense.
I don't feel like it does. I feel like Germany was so fierce in part because German is like, that's like an name, like the Germans are coming. Imagine if the name got switched and the Belgians were called the Germans, and like the Nazis had tried to invade, and everyone was like, oh, the Walloons are invading. Yeah, that's not going to go. Yeah.
Yeah, well listen, let's boot up a risk game.
Yeah, we'll figure it out, all right. So yeah, Leopold the first, Leopold the Second's dad died in December of eighteen sixty five, the same year the American Civil War ended. Leopold is now the king and thirty years old. This appears to be the point when he decided to grow a gigantic mountain man beard tight, which he would maintain for the rest of his day. He needed it. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of pictures of Leopold with a beard. We'll post him on the site. Some of them look uncomfortably like me. Some of them are clear missteps in the beard growing process, where he's got like gigantic mutton chops and it's he looks like a fucking hair octopus style of the time. Yeah, he went through some rough patches in his sartorial history, for sure. That's pretty.
That's got ain't easy we're looking at Yeah.
That's a rough picture, cheap and it's almost he's almost wearing bell bottoms in that picture. A it's the sixties. It is the eighteen sixties boom, all right. So yeah, Leopold's the King of Belgium. He's super frustrated because the king doesn't have that much in the way of power. Leopold takes to sort of mocking the restrained role that he has in Belgian politics. There's a story of like this guy who came to visit him because like, you know, the king's got a visit with like his donors and benefactors and whatnot. And this guy complains about the poor state of the roads around his property, and Leopold interrupts him and says, I have no authority to change the roads. You want to address yourself to the press, especially to the small papers. The municipality and the government will do anything they ask. So he was like, he was like making a point. Yeah, I'm frustrated that, like I can't do anything, so I'm just kind of like to take it to the press. Your King's not allowed to do anything. He sort of set to work making himself into kind of an image for the Belgian people. He was the aristocratic equivalent of an alpha male. He spent a lot of time doing science work and you know, supporting the arts and sciences. Nineteenth century science is just like beakers of lead and shows. He's pouring colored water into beakers. He's got goggles on, you know, you know how that goes. Yeah, there's a quote from his biography that says he used to sleep in a camp bed so like a military cot and had a general horror of everything that could innervate or under him. A feminate, so he's kind of like a he's a proud boy. Proud boy.
Yeah, that's what they call people who aren't racist soy boys.
Is that right? Yeah? Because eating soy feminizes you again, Yeah, that's what that's the alt right thing. Yeah.
Hey, well at least we know that they have a nice historical antasy.
Leopold would have been all about that stuff. So he's he's grown a giant, weird beard, he's sleeping in a palace in a military cop He's scared of girls. Uh. He hates spending money. His biography says, quote his pocket handkerchief was only renewed on Sunday mornings when going to Mass, and on no account would he take another in the interval. If his valets changed his towels more than once a week, they were sure to receive a good scolding from his majesty. What So he's like a gross miser. Yeah, don't clean those dells. Oh, which one of those wasn't one? Of the alt right guys living in their mom's basement.
I think most of them are will definitely want Yeah yeah that guy, yeah, ruche V, the pickup artist guy that was found living in his mom's base Yeah, yeah, that's what this guy was. Leopold was missing. Yeah, yeah, I guess the Beard. The Beard experiment clearly on that factor.
His mom died young, so he became a king. Yeah yep.
Instead, okay, called peacocking everyone I interract women the kingdom.
Yeah, kick, I mean having a castle is pretty solid peacocking, that's true. Yeah, undeniable yeah. Uh. Leopold the Second was noted in his biography is the first king to treat his kingship as a corporate endeavor. His primary concern was making money, not for Belgium, but for himself. It's all about the bottom line. Yeah. So there's like when you talk about dictators and warlords and terrorists, there's like a tendency to call them psychopaths and sociopaths. Yeah. Sociopath is like an actual medical diagnosis. And I don't think guys like Hitler or Stalin, Yeah really it because they all had histories of like warm family life and like people who cared about them and people that they like sacrificed for. At times, Leopold might have been a straight up like the mark store level monster.
Yeah, because that's that's what they say, right, is like so many CEOs and Fortune five hundred whatever the fu. Yeah, there was over represented, like psychopathic traits.
Yeah. Even his positive biography says that while he was charming, he was quote devoid of enthusiasm and set himself and was quite incapable of arousing any and others. So he just can't utually touch people's heart. Yeah, he can't motivate people. So, yeah, we're going to get more into the soulless Leopold the second, his scheme to find a colony and the colony that he eventually founds. But first we've got some ads.
Of course, we all realize it's a pro corporate podcast, so let's keep it real.
Here's some buying advice, and we're back. We're back. We're talking about King Leopold, who is searching for a little colony somewhere in the world to fill that hole little.
Heart the Deuce, of course.
Yeah, Leopold, the Deuce. Leopold I Electric Boogloo whenever you want to call him. We were just talking about what a Solis sociopathic creepy is. Allegedly, yeah, allegedly. Well here's another quote again, This is from like a positive pro Leopold biography that he probably paid for. He disliked music, hunting, tobacco, and had no taste for physical exercises except walking. Although a frequent visitor at Austin, which is like one of his palaces, he never learned to swim. He was seen yawning in a gala performance of Faust. So he doesn't like plays, he doesn't like art. He hates music. Like That's the thing. Any book you read about him, anyone who knew him. He hated music, like not like he hated popular music. Yeah, music itself was offensive to him.
So that's fascinating. Well that's cutting into the American psycho narrative.
Yeah unfortunately, yeah a little bit. Yeah, he's a weird guy. He's very vain, but his main vanity was quite odd. He thought he had the most beautiful hands in all of Europe, tight his biography. What his biography notes. Another of Leopold's hobbies was his dislike for gloves, and although he often wore uniform he is never reported to have put on gloves. It may have been a hatred of restraint, but more probably it was a pardonable vanity on the part of the late king, for he possessed the shapely and beautiful hand of the Orlean family.
That rules so hard.
Here's the only picture I could find hands. No, he's holding the gloves in his hand, so his hand is not even stronger.
Actually, yeah, like reminding people you could be wearing gloves.
I'm the master of the Yeah, and his I mean, in fairness to him, his hands are beauty full in this picture. I mean they just just look at the bone definition. Yeah, they are shapely. They good ass hands. Yeah, they good ass hands. Oh man, So that.
Means that he made some painter do multiple drafts on those hands.
That's like, this is like, isn't it wait, rested development where the guy has a fake hands.
Always always thought the lawyer and always Sonny always has fake hands.
And yeah, then there's some things to be said about our president and hands. Nah, it's weird. It's weird that you would even like, I never think about my hands, Yeah, like how they look like when I'm thinking about someone taking a picture of me. Like zero percent of the time, and I'm like, oh my god, my hands do they look shapely?
Do you know what's crazy is I had to send a picture of a piece of equipment for this job I'm on to a technical person and I just took a picture of my phone and send it to them.
And I realized as I was sending the email, I was like, my hands a fucked up in this.
I'm having a real low hand self esteem day.
Oh I think you have the shapely hands of the or Leone family.
I know you're being really nice right now, but it's actually a little hilarious that the one day possibly in my life, that I've noticed my hands.
Horrible, I was like, what the fuck is up with my hands? Only these were feet. Yeah.
I've been an arm model before. My friend was doing some not like you know, elbows down I was doing, was doing some stock photography, which like I wanted to take pictures of your arms, and I was like, you're wilding out. So you know what, I'm good. I'm good risk to elbow, wrist to elbow, Yeah, I got I got forearm, my forearms are I'm about it?
Well. Leopold was a hand man. Yeah, so We've got this frustrated, greedy, gorgeous handed king on the throne of Belgium. He keeps trying to get his countrymen to jump on board the having a colony train that the people of Belgium express zero interest in this. Oh okay, wait, why what do you mean? All right? Because obviously all.
European colonialism is pretty much the root of almost everything.
That's wrong in the world right now. But here is. But I don't understand why they.
I mean, they certainly didn't I'm gonna guess not want to do it.
For the reasons why I don't think they should have done it. I think the Belgians, for one thing, So the Belgiums of this era, anyone who's like a mature adult lived through what was at that point, he equipped World War two, the Napoleonic Wars, like we just don't want any trouble, Like you just want to stay in Belgium and eat chocolate and drink beer. We don't really want to go to Africa or Asia. And let's say the first of die not the first? Can I say?
I can continue an incredibly list, long list of ignorant as shit. I'm about to say.
You do you is Belgium landlocked? No? No, no, no, it has an antwerp antwarp, that's right, Okay, a number of small Yeah. Yeah, it's a wee little country. You can drive across it in a couple of hours. Yeah, okay.
I was just like, okay, yeah, I was just like, it's funny to imagine a landlocked country ownings and stuff.
But of course they can. Who gives a shit, But they're not landlocked, so fuck me. Yeah, no they're not. They didn't have a colony at this point, and they seem to have zero interest in having one now. At this same time, from eighteen seventy four to eighteen seventy seven, when Leopold's like a decade or so into his kinghood, there's this explorer named Henry Morton Stanley, and yeah, from seventy four to seventy seven, he completes a seven thousand mile expedition across Central Africa. Much of his travels centered upon the still undiscovered by like white people, Congo. No one had like mapped the extent of the Congo River. We didn't know where it originated from at this point. So at this time in European history, like different explorers mapping Africa are kind of like the Marvel movie franchise of the day. Yeah, Like each of these guys is world famous and like newspapers breathlessly cover every expedition, and whenever they finish an expedition, they write a book and millions of people by it so automatically exactly, this is like the thing people care about at this point in time. It's like what these explorers are doing in Africa and all over the world.
Like that just means if I were alive then and a white person two big f's, I would be like struggling to get on one of the good expeditions.
Yeah you really like fingers crossed. It's not one of the ones where people eat each other.
Yeah yeah, yeah, statistically a lot of them are.
Yeah. So Stanley maps like a huge chunk of the Congo, more than anyone had ever done before, and it's like big news. He gets back to Europe from Africa and he goes on tour. He's doing like speaking engagements. He's a big celebrity.
I feel like there's a lot of like skulls and calipers in a talk like this.
Yeah, and probably buckets of racism. Yeah, like totally unexamined racism. My look, don't look. If you don't look, it's not there. Yeah, that's the racist motto. So he's touring around and King Leopold winds up meeting with him. Stanley had been bullish on the idea that the Congo would be a great place for a colony, and he wanted the British to set up a colony there the Ogs.
You want to go to the best colonizing studio first.
Yeah, exactly, that's like the is Paramount good? Probably not. I don't know anything about the Warner Brothers we all live in.
But the Disney that's the Disney.
Yeah, Britain's the Disney of colonizing. Yeah, And instead he goes to I don't know who's who's making DC's garbage movies, Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers. Okay, so Leopold's Warner Brothers.
No, they're not even in it.
Leopold is like this has gotten very confusing. Leopold is like, uh, a.
Snapchat making stuff, Like technically they got the our YouTube like it's a YouTube show. Yeah, you know, like they got the money. Let's actually call it no history for it, but who knows.
I feel like we actually hit upon the right thing to compare him to, which is Amazon. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So Stanley tries to sell his Congo idea to Disney Slash Britain and it fails, and King Leopold aka Amazon's like, well, we might be interested in this plan. Yeah, we'll fund this. Why don't you, Why don't you give me your elevator pitch colony in the Congo? Huh? I like it. I like this idea. Yeah. So Leopold contracts Stanley to work for him and he sends him back to Africa with a new mission. So Leopold's master plan here, I'm going to appeal back for a minute. Then we're going to zoom into the different pieces because it's a complicated ass plant. His master plan is to create the Congo Free State, which is a supposedly independent African nation that just happened to also be ruled by King Leopold the Second. Sure, So he went about doing this in a few ways. In eighteen seventy six, he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference, where he invited a bunch of European experts to form the so called International African Association, which, of course had no Africans as members. The association was a supposedly philanthropic organization. I'm going to read you a selection from Leopold's speech at the conference where he sort of lays out what he wants to do. The subject that calls us together today is one that demands a first place in the attention of friends of humanity to open up to civilization. The only part of our globe where she has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations is I may venture to say a crusade worthy of this century of progress, and I am glad to observe how very favorable public feeling is to its accomplishment. The current is with us. So he gets this association together and he says, this is an international group and we're trying to civilize Africa and improve lives of people who were there.
I didn't realize that back then. The rhetoric was already like the kind of like, ah, this is to help them double speak. I actually just assumed they were like, yeah, I'm gonna take this ship from black people.
No, they are, and these guys the people he invites to the Geographic conference and forms the International African Association with these guys are a lot of people who legitimately want to make things better for Africans who aren't even thinking about making it. Yeah. Yeah.
These are the well meaning liberal white people.
Yeah, exactly, and like missionaries who are like and well meaning liberal white people. Because there's an Arab slave trade in Africa, like traders moving through the Congo, and the abolition movement is very big at this point in time, and so these people are being like, we've got to stop the slave trade in Africa. So Leopold's like, we can do that. And there's a bunch of people who are like, we've got to Christianize the Africans, and Leopold's like, we can do that, and like so that's that's what he's claiming this association.
Okay, so this is right, This is like definitely like colonialism two point zero or three point zero.
He steps ahead of everyone. Yeah yeah, he's not even framing this as colonialism. He's framing this as a charitable endeavor to exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he suggests that Belgium would be a great place for this new international body to meet because it's a neutral country and it's centrally located in Europe. And then he suggests that he might be a good person to run the association just for its first year. You pitch yourself, you know, you got to be for its first year. And he assures them all that he's doing this from the goodness of his heart. He says, Belgium is small, she is happy and satisfied with her lot. I have no other ambition than to serve well. And it was true that Belgians were pretty happy with their lot. But Leopold did have some ambitions. So he gets elected head of the International African Association the first year, and then he gets elected the head of it the second year too, even though that was supposed to be illegal. Back to back, and then the association kind of stops existing, and Leopold replaces it with the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, and then he replaces that with the International Association for the Congo. On paper, these are all different international philanthropic groups. Their names were deliberately forgettable and similar, so the public would assume they were all the same thing. In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hoschild writes that Leopold directly told his aides quote, care must be taken not to let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the African Association are two different things. The public doesn't grasp that. So in reality, all of these philanthropic groups are shadow fronts for Leopold's plan to conquer the Congo. So they're all charity organizations that he gets international aid money getting sent into, and he's able to pour Belgian government funds into as rights and donations, just like Hillary Clinton. Exactly like Hillary Clinton. Yes, you've watched the documentary Clinton Catch by Deniche Desoza. Yes.
The thing that's amazing about this is it's so complicated a plan that doesn't feel like I mean, I don't you know, I'm a super smart person.
Of course I'm not.
Finding a place where you could improvise your way into this.
You just gotta wait, because we're not even halfway through the planet. Like this, he's he is a legitimate like okay, so the villain that Marvel keeps trying to write and like failing to write in my opinion, where it's like the low key character where there he's got all these plans within plans and the step ahead Leopold actually was that guy to the whole world, but in sort of the same villainous way. You're like, this is insane.
There's so many things that could go wrong in this.
So he's now created three different philanthropic associations just because like the backers will start realizing that the association's fake and they'll pull their money, but he'll keep the organization alive, or he'll roll its assets into a new organization. And nobody who got caught, who realized that this was some weird show company, wants to admit that they got caught, so they just don't say anything, and the public just hears like, oh, it's the new thing is out the International African Association. It's that group of people trying to make life better in Africa, right, So he all these groups are basically funneling money into the work of Henry Morton Stanley, that explorer who Leopold sent back to Africa. So Leopold sent him back in eighteen seventy nine, and his job was to start building, using the association money, a series of stations along the Congo River to act as like waypoints for steamboat traffic. He also met with hundreds of local chiefs all throughout the Congo, all the different people who had chunks of land throughout the Congo, the different villages and chiefs, hundreds and hundreds of them. He meets with these guys and he gets them to sign treaties giving up their rights to the land. Here's a quote from Hostchild's book. The very word treaty is a euphemism. For many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. I few had ever seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their excess to documents in a foreign language and in legalese. These guys weren't ignorant of the concept of diplomacy. They knew it meant to write treaties of friendship with neighboring tribes or villages. They understood the idea of a non aggression pact, and that's what they thought these were. The reality was somewhat different. Quote in return for one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they promised too freely of their own accord for themselves and their heirs and successors, forever give up to set association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories. So basically he gives them cloth. They think that they're getting some sick ass clothes just for Agia.
This is this is a thing. Here's our everyone gets a jersey.
You give us shirts. We promise we won't shoot you. We don't want to shoot you anyway. That sounds great. In reality, these are all statements saying that they give up other rights to the International African Association, and the Association will have the right to collect taxes on the people who gave up their rights to their land, and those taxes, because there's no currency in most of the Congo, those taxes can be paid in labor. So Leopold gets hundreds of chiefs from Stanley to sign these agreements. Yeah, Jesus, so Europe thinks Stanley's over there doing valuable philanthropic work fighting with the slave traders and trying to open the Congo up to free trade. That's the buzzword everyone's using. It's like, we're going to open the congoup to free trade and it'll benefit the Africans, it'll benefit Europe. Everyone will benefit if there's free trade in the Congo. Meanwhile, what he's actually doing is getting pieces of paper that give Leopold the rights to the Congo, that make it look like all these chiefs have come together and said, we want this guy to be our king, and we want to be a country. So I feel like I should break for just a second and talk a little bit more about Henry Morton Stanley. Who's the guy who's actually doing all this leg work. He was one of the greatest explorers in history, and he was also a human garbage fire sort of a definitely a Darth Vader too. He was terrified by the thought of being touched by a woman, just like Darth Vader. He once cut off his own dog's tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog for no real reason. And he basically, when I say he was an explorer, he shot his way through Africa. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a quote from a description of one of Stanley's expeditions in King Leopold's Ghost. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. So, yeah, he's shooting his way through these tribes taking their food, taking their shit, burning down villages if there's any resistance. One of his men described just hunting people like the predator, like laying in wait and just shooting random strangers.
Like less ethical than the predator who lead out has a certain code.
Yeah yeah, way less epical than the predators. So these guys are predatoring their way through through Africa, but they're not.
Particularly worse than any other explorer of the time.
I would he's one of the worst. Okay, they vary. So Henry Morton Stanley, you know, the doctor Livingstone. I presume he's that guy. Yeah, yeah, And doctor Livingston was apparently a pretty nice guy. He was also an explorer and actually would like get to know people and like invocate himself into the local culture. So some of these guys are legitimately just in it for the sake of exploration, and they're scientists and they're good to the people they encounter. And some of them, like Stanley, just want to make a shitload of money and they're creepy. And Stanley is one of the kills thousands of people while he's exploring. Got it, got it?
I just want to I guess when I met not as a mitigating thing of like everyone was doing it, but like, uh, if not the only standard practice, it was.
Not what you're describing is not not he's a standard he's it's definitely common practice on a lot of these guys. But he's not near to the only one. But he's one of the worst, Yeah for sure. Okay, So yeah, While Stanley's expedition is going on, Leopold also hires a bunch of other expeditions to explore other parts of Africa. These were deliberately showy expeditions meant to distract public attention. One of them involved a team of four Indian elephants being sent to Africa to see if they could reed with African elephants. All of the elephants died horribly, but the news covered the story the whole time. So nobody's reading about what Stanley's doing because they think it's a boring philanthropical mission and there's this crazy story about elephants, let's read about that. It's so fucking dark, holy sh So he's clearly understands the media well enough that he's not just thinking about how to accomplish his plan, but how to distract public attention and while he does it. When Morton Stanley gets back from his expedition, he writes a book. It's an instant bestseller. King Leopold edits it himself. That's one of the things he'd insisted on is that Stanley could write a book about this, but King Leopold would get to edit it. And most of what he did was correct the times when Stanley mixed up the different associations and committees that he was supposedly working for, because nobody could keep it straight but Leopold.
That's such an attention to detail, that's unbelievable.
Like I said, he's the first modern, truly modern bastard. Yeah, so this book is sort of framed as like Henry Morton Stanley's helping the Congo Free State be born and helping these Africans like take their stab at nationhood and joining the international community and whatnot. So that's how all this is being played in the outside world. The reality in the Congo is very different, and what happens next is not what anyone but Leopold had expected. And we're going to get into that in a minute. But right now, Andrew, do you have too much money? Oh? Hell yeah? Well, one of the great things to do with too much money is spend it on products, products like the ones that I'm going to talk about now Here's so we're back and King Leopold has sent an explorer off to the Congo to trick a bunch of tribes people into signing away their rights to the land, while he's distracted the rest of Europe with a bunch of showy expeditions.
So it's just like it used to be, just like cannons and soldiers swords, I guess, and now it's pr and fake treaties and stuff.
Yeah. Wow, it's really modern in a lot of ways. So Leopold has this new best selling book that's talking about the great stuff he's trying to do in the Congo that gets the public jazz, and he's able to sort of further push the legitimacy of his project by getting the US President Chester A. Arthur to recognize the Congo Free State. Leopold had charmed the former US Minister to Belgium, a guy who called himself General Sanford, even though he wasn't actually a general, but he was a rich guy who had a lot of money and like an orange plantation. Because he was a rich guy. He was able to get the president's ear General Sandford appealed to President Arthur's dislike of Arabs because again, there were all these Arab slave traders.
Yeah, so just yes, nothing's changed, Yeah, okay, nothing's new.
Yeah, so Chester A. Arthur was. He also pointed out that the Congo had been discovered by an American because Henry Morton Stanley called himself an American. He wasn't. He was actually British, but he light his whole life and said he was American. Everyone lies about everything in the eighteen hundred Yeah, internet, because there yeah, yeah, nothing like you you run into a thousand colonels when you're reading anything in this period, and none of them are colonels. Sure, none of them were ever in the military. Like I'm going to be fried chicken colonels. Fine, And in this case of General anyway, Chesterry Arthur was like, sounds great, Congo free straights, sounds like a great idea. You're going to fight some Arabs. Hooray. Yeah. So he included this next bit in his State of the Union speech, recognizing the Congo free state. Quote from Chester A. Arthur, the rich and populous valley of the Congo spelled with a K in. This is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs. Roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river, and the Nuclei of states established under one flag, which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. Oh my god, So that's how Chester A. Arthur pictures it.
So he got paid placement for his propaganda. Yeah, in the State of the Union.
Yeah, in the State of the Union. So far the people of Belgium and the other European states are fooled pretty well. But France and some other folks and like the British government and whatnot are starting to catch on the Leopold's plan and realize that he's making a power grab. This helped us spark a general what's known as the Scramble for Africa, where all these European powers are like, oh my god, we're running out of Africa to take over, so they start shooting out expeditions to claim the last pieces of the continent before it fills up. This all culminates in the Berlin Conference of eighteen eighty four to eighty five, and a bunch of stuff is decided there. But Leopold's main goal is to get recognition for what he starts calling the Congo Free State. He's basically like, I've got all these treaties. Like he gets up in front of Europe and he's like, I got all these treaties. Look, the people of the Congo want to be their own state. They want me to be their king. They've given this the state, the rights to their land. And if you all back me in establishing the state, it'll be a free trade zone, so all everyone will be able to trade freely and buy and sell freely in there. It'll make a bunch of money for everybody. So that's Leopold's pitch man, and Europe buys it. In eighteen eighty five, the Congo Free State is established. Leopold had to go in front of Belgium Senate to ask if he could be two kings at once. He promised that the Congo would be its own independent nation and that it would pay its own way in the world. He told Belgium he thought it was his duty to quote help the nations of second rank become useful members of the great family of nations. Then he asked for money, a little loone to help the fledgling new nation. And he asked his fellow Belgians to volunteer to help in this bold project quote more than any other. A manufacturing and commercial people like ourselves ought to strive to obtain a market for all its workers, for thinkers, capitalists and workmen. So the Congo Free State is on paper a country with Leopold the Second as its absolute ruler. So he's gone from the King of Belgium. Yeah, he doesn't really have any power to be of a country like twenty times the size of Belgium. Jesus Christ. So the Congo Free State is to all intends and purposes of state. It has its own army, the Force Publique, which is made up of African soldiers led by Belgian officers. It's illegal for black men to be officers in the Army of the Congo.
Yeah that sounds about right.
Yeah, So Man Leopold has acquired himself an African empire. Unfortunately, he didn't want an empire. He had no desire to actually rule and others wanted money. He just wanted money. So the Congo Free State is entirely a money making scheme and it's all based around rubber. So the late eighteen hundreds is when rubber really started to take off. That's like in the mid eighteen hundreds or so is when they figure out how to vulcanize rubber, which is what makes it like nice and shiny and stable and it doesn't smell weird and fall apart. It's so the Macintosh coat becomes popular around this time. People like in Europe are just like covered headed tone rubber, Like it's it's everywhere. It's like the fashion of the time, right, people are just flipping out over rubber. Fetishes are born tons exactly, hot air balloons. It's like this one. It's a wonder material. It's like the first time people they don't have to use glass for everything. Yeah, so everyone's in love with rubber. But there's only two ways to make rubber at that time, vines and trees. Now, rubber vines grew wild all around the Congo.
It was the two ways are vines and trees. There's rubber vines and there's rubber. Yeah, I thought it was going to be vegetation and chemistry.
No they didn't. They do now we can make yeah, yeah, but they hadn't figured that shit out. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, harvesting all of the rubber from vines like the ones who grew in the Congo required thousands and thousands of people climbing trees in the jungle. There's the risk of snake bite and monster attacks, and it's just a nightmare harvesting, yeah, at large scale in the Congo. Harvesting rubber from trees, on the other hand, is really easy, and some enterprising people had already started planting groves of rubber trees in South America, but those trees took about twenty years or so to really get going. So Leopold standing here in charge of the Congo, knows that he has about twenty years to be the world's leading producer of rubber. The Congo Free State wasn't basically just a giant rubber factory. That was his whole vision for this land filled with millions of people.
Yeah, this is like the actual story of Willy Wonk.
Yeah, he's the real Willy Wonka. Yeah, exactly. Jesus Christ. So now I remember when I said that Leopold had the right to collect taxes in the form of labor. Mm hmm, Well, he used these taxes to make Congolese people go harvest rubber for him. In theory, I think he was allowed to only demand like forty hours a month from them or something. But what happened is that he would have his soldiers go from village to village and take hostages. These hostages would be put in concentration camps where they'd be starved and beaten until the village met its rubber quota. So if you didn't get all the rubber that you were supposed to get soon enough, your family would just starve. Today, Leopold's government did have a problem because obviously it needs soldiers to enforce these nightmarish rules. But white people die like crazy in the Congo, Like more than a third of the Belgians who went there died there. And since again it's illegal for Africans to be officers in the Force Publique, there would wind up being like four or five Belgian guys commanding hundreds and hundreds of African soldiers. So that's obviously you're treating these guys terribly. You're making the massacre their own people, and there's five of you for every five hundred of them. That's like a recipe for a revolution, or it would be if the soldiers had free access to bullets. One of the ways the Belgians controlled their army was by heavily restricting when anybody would get bullets, and by policing their AMMO so they couldn't hide any away. So each soldier would only be issued a certain amount of AMMO when they'd go out to get rubber, and if they fired any rounds, they had to account for them. The general policy in the Congo became that if you fired around, you had to provide a right hand from a corpse for every round that you shot. This was meant to stop people from stockpiling AMMO, and it was meant to stop them from like hunting for animals, Yeah, when they should have been, you know, shooting people. What this actually meant, yeah, exactly.
So but that creates a market for right hands exactly. Yeah, so possibly go wrong.
Yeah. For one thing, these soldiers aren't fed enough, so they're starving and they start hunting, and then once they fired a couple rounds hunt and animal they need to pick up Okay, well we fired three rounds getting that whatever it is. Now we need three hands. So we need to go into a village. We need to take some people's hands. And in addition to that, like it becomes common if a village refuses to provide rubber, like people are like, we're not going to work to you. We're not going to give up a relatives as hostages. The Force Publique would just burn down the whole village. Sometimes they just kill everybody in the entire village. And this is happening on basically an industrial scale. In nineteen oh three, a single rubber collecting post was sent more than forty thousand replacement rounds of ammunition to every round that they're being sent. They've got a hand. Yeah, So like the military units and the Force Publique even would have a keeper of the hands whose job was to smoke all of the severed hands so that they preserve, so that you could go back to the authority of evidence. We need twenty thousand more bullets. Here's twenty thousand human hands. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So in eighteen eighty five, when this whole operation is just getting off the ground, King Leopold is named in British court as a client of what the British called a disorderly house. Can you guess what a disorderly house was? Uh? Probably not enough. It's a punishment, is what I'll go for it. Yeah, I know it's a brothelh So while this is all starting off, King sorry, a whorehouse in England, I thought, I.
Thought you disorderly house meant like his dukedom didn't have like x or y like paperwork filed.
No, no, no. While he's freshly the king of the Belgian Congo, he's named in British court as a client of a whorehouse, and they say that he had been paying eight hundred pounds a month for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old. That's so, I mean, that's what Leopold's doing in between administering the Congo. Yeah. And while he's doing that, his men in the Congo are building a system of roads, railways, posts and steamboats that are meant to allow the rubber making operation to prosper. Leopold doesn't want to pay for all this himself, so he claimed the infrastructure is nes so that the Free States army can fight those dastardly Arab slavers. Got the US to pay for it, or just generally he got everyone else to pay for it. So he got in Europe on board with this by saying the Congo is going to be a free trade zone. But then he's like, we need to build all this infrastructure in order to fight the slavers, so we're gonna have to collect import taxes.
Now nice, He's.
Just he like. The one thing you can trust Leopold to do is he will fuck over every single person. Yeah. Yeah. So now even these countries who had gotten on board because they thought this was a free trade zone, they're getting screwed. And of course the millions of people whose hands he's having severed being screwed. I guess the key is just never stop lying. Yeah, no, that's the thing. Whenever you read about any of these guys. That is the most important thing. He's never ever stop lying. If you're going to be a monster, you have to lie consistently for decades about everything. All right, Yeah, I'm in. It works, Yeah no, I mean I'm in. Well, you'll be a great king of the Congo. Ha ha. So to Leopold's credit. His men did fight Arab slave traders, but most of the fighting was done by conscripted African soldiers who were themselves basically slaves. Yeah yeah. King Leopold personally endorsed a system where white agents of the Free State got a bonus if they were able to find more recruits for the Force Public. Many agents wound up buying them in from various chiefs and effect doing the same thing as the Arab slavers they bragged about fighting. State agents also got bonuses for quote reducing recruiting expenses, so if they outright enslaved people rather than paid them to join, they got more money in their pocket. As many as three quarters of all volunteers for the Force Public died before they could receive training. Most of those volunteers were teenagers.
Right, yeah, so they're just volunteers quote unquote, that's fucking incredible. So it was like, we have our indentured servant army as going to fight your slave army.
So basically the Congo at this point is groups of white guys with soldiers going into the jungle to collect a bunch of other soldiers and they'll put them in chains and like march them through the jungle and most of them will die, and then they'll train those guys up to fight. Then they'll take those guys into the jungle to tell people to collect rubber from people, and to kill everyone who doesn't provide enough rubber, and to kill a lot of the people who do provide enough rubber, just because these kids are like starving to death, and maybe they have to shoot an animal, or maybe there's rebels and they get into a firefight, but they don't have killing it. Yeah, and then you got to take hands from these So it just keeps spiraling out of control and becoming even more of a nightmare to everybody but Leopold, because again he's sitting back in Belgium. This time, since Leopold was the absolute monarch, he got to rule by royal decree. His first decree was that all quote vacant land was now property of the state. He didn't explain what vacant meant, because obviously farmers don't live on every inch of their farmland, so basically most of the land in the Congo was now just his. He leased this land to a series of private corporations, and this gets to the real brilliance of his scheme. Because Leopold didn't have to dirty his hands actually running any of the rubber harvesting, he was able to private right. Yeah, other people paid for the right to mine rubber and cut off hands and do all the actual work, and Leopold owned the rights to a huge chunk of their profits. So basically, these companies would come in and give him an owning stake in the corporation, they.
Would license the scheme of enslaving people, cutting off their hands, etc.
Yeah. Adam Hoschild in King Leopold's Ghost compares the Congo Free State to a venture capital firm. Quote, he had essentially found a way to attract other people's capital to his investment schemes, while he retained half the proceeds. In the end, what with various taxes and fees the companies paid the state, it came to more than half Jesus. So in the eighteen nineties, the Congo Free State really starts putting out rubber, and suddenly King Leopold is one of the richest guys in the world. He starts buying gigantic monuments and palaces and shit for Belgium big show projects, some of which are still there. It is to make people like him, it's to keep him popular at home. He's succeeding beyond his wildest dreams in the business side of things, but his personal life is just kind of one series of train wrecks after the other. Yeah, his son had died in eighteen sixty four, which led to an understandable estrangement between Leopold and his wife. It took eight years before they could stand to be around each other and try again. This passage from Leopold's biography tells you a lot about the relationships between the sexes. In the eighteen sixties quote, Leopold the Second was anxious to have a male heir, and in eighteen seventy two, Queen Marie Henriette consented to resume conjugal life with her royal spouse, from whom she had separated sometime before. She sacrificed herself, as one may say, for her country. A child was born unto them, but alas it was a daughter and not a son, which was given unto them. So that's messed up for a lot of reasons, Jesus, one of which is just that even in the pro Leopold biography, it just admits that having sex with Leopold is a sacrifice.
Actually, I'm surprised that the amount of agency she has, Like, you know, she is the queen facing pressure, but wasn't forced at guillotine point or whatever to.
She kind of was. I guess that's true.
I guess that's between the lines, of course.
Yeah, Jesus, it's I mean, she probably has more agency than the average, but at the same time, in a way she has less because it's less important for a commoner to have a son. Yeah, yeah, because like the king, that's like the whole dynasty thing. So you might say she has even less.
We probably should say that, Yeah, we probably would be respected for the record or that.
Yeah. So yeah, Leopold did not take having a daughter very well. This quote is from King Leopold's ghost. When the last daughter, Clementine, was born, according to his sister Luis, the king was furious and thenceforth refused to have anything to do with his admirable wife from the beginning. She wrote, quote, the king paid very little attention to me or my sisters, so he doesn't pay attention to his daughters, and he mostly seems to care when one of them, like fucks with his garden. Here's a recollection from Luis. Large juicy peaches grew on the walls of the gardens, and the king was very proud of them. I had a passion for peaches, and one day I dared eat one, which was hidden away among the leaves. And that year peaches were plentiful. But the following day the king discovered the theft. What a dramatic moment. At once suspected, I confessed my crime and was promptly punished. I did not realize that the king counted his peaches. So while Leopold is running a nightmare hand harvesting rubber making scheme in the Congo, he's got enough time to make sure that his daughter doesn't steal a peach.
Fuck, Because it's like, at least Ivanka Trump has the decency to pretend that she loved her time with her dad, even though, like in all those stories she tells, it's sad and weird too, But it's like, at least she's like, I love him. He's my dad, you know, And I believe in all this shit. He couldn't even get his daughters to be like I.
Love Well, there's gonna be more about his daughters coming in here. He's he is not a great dad. Yeah, if you can't tell that, huh. There's in fact, no evidence that Leopold cared about any of his children as anything more than vehicles for his legacy. Even that fawning nineteen ten biography can't make it seem like Leopold had a single fuck for his family. As King Leomara, I'm gonna be honest, that's so far the most relatable thing about it.
I'm not liking his family, Yeah.
Just kidding. I love your fam As King Leopold grew older and richer, he also became a full on hypochondriac. He took to wearing a waterproof bag around his gigantic beard whenever he went outside in the rain or when he swam. He required his palace tablecloths to be boiled every day to kill any germs, which is at least a character evolution from not letting them wash his sheets. Yeah, snapkin, Yeah, so he's changing. He's had his own little hero's journey. Yeah, yeah, we all get there. Yeah, hypochondriac. This wound up being another really really long one. There was just so much research, So this is going to be a two parter podcast, and the second part is going to drop on Thursday, so we'll be getting into the rest of Leopold's story in the tremendously dark story of the Congo. So stick around check back out on Thursday. It's going to be great. In the meantime, you can check out Andrew T's podcast, os This Racist. You can also check out every other episode of Behind the Bastards. You can find us on Twitter at Bastards Pod and Instagram as well. You can find us on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com and you can find me on Twitter at I Write Okay, So Andrew and I will be back on Thursday with more Leopold, so check us out then. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
